


think we're gonna break before i get a chance to say this

by shinelikestars



Category: Santa Clarita Diet (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Drabble, F/M, Fluff and Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-31
Updated: 2019-03-31
Packaged: 2019-12-27 02:13:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,888
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18294773
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shinelikestars/pseuds/shinelikestars
Summary: feelings are terrifying, and loving eric bemis even more so. but if abby can handle killing the undead, she's probably gonna have to get used to this, too.(AKA the one where abby reflects on her feelings for eric and realizes just how scary it can be to love somebody)





	think we're gonna break before i get a chance to say this

**Author's Note:**

> hi all, this is a very drabbly kind of character study that i wrote over the course of about an hour so don't take it too seriously haha, just something i wanted to do in celebration of season three coming out (and me immediately binge-watching it over 24 hours)! SPOILERS for season three ahead so don't read if you haven't watched yet!
> 
> note: any run-on sentences/drabbly or kind of weird sentences are intentional and meant to represent the absolute wreck that abby's mind is at the moment 
> 
> song title taken from "simplify" by young the giant which i 100% believe fits eric and abby to a T
> 
> thanks for reading and hope you enjoy!

She doesn’t mean to love Eric. It just _happens_ , somewhere along the line, creeps up on her before she could even entertain the idea of giving her bastard heart permission to actually have feelings for someone.

 

It’s unfair, really, and of course nothing about her life has been fair these past four weeks — but _still_. Still, it feels cruel, to care so deeply about someone she only maybe would’ve given a second glance a month ago, to walk around feeling like she’s got an open wound in her chest at all times. It’s cruel, the way the notion of Eric ever getting hurt provokes a visceral reaction in her, makes her hands ball into fists and her stomach turn and her vision go red. It’s cruel, knowing the million different ways her life could go wrong at any given moment, knowing that her mom’s immortality puts them all in an unbearably dangerous situation 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

 

It’s cruel, that her heart had to go and fall in love with him, when she could lose him so easily. 

 

—

Vulnerability has always made her uncomfortable, and Abby doesn’t doubt that it always will, at least a little bit. Being exposed, having someone see every bit of your soul and the potential of them not liking it, is scary. That’s why love has never really interested her; homecoming dates and romantic comedies were never her thing, and though she’d let Sarah and Emily drag her to the movies and to their stupid dances, though she’d forever grin and bear it, it didn’t make her light up the way it did for them. 

 

Familial love was one thing. She couldn’t deny that she loved her parents, much as they got on her nerves. But that was _expected_ of her, it was normal, and she didn’t have to put herself out on a limb to say she loved her mom and dad. They couldn’t reject her, or pretend like they hadn’t wanted her, and unlike some of her friends’ parents, they never tried to, even if she came home with a failing grade on a test or got a detention for punching some asshole in the face. Her parents loved her for who she was, simple as that, and Abby had no choice but to love them back for that. 

 

But Eric is different. She guesses it makes sense, in a way, for one of the strangest kids in their class to have to be the one who changes everything for her. He’s never gone with the status quo, and it’s only fitting for that to apply to her love life, too. That doesn’t make it any less infuriating. 

 

Sven is a welcome distraction, but trying to love him feels like holding two puzzle pieces that just don’t line up. He has a gorgeous face, and a decent enough heart, but when Abby tries to picture him cleaning up in the kitchen after one of her mom’s particularly messy feasts, or driving with her to the desert to bury a body — she just can’t. And she knows, of course, that those aren’t normal criteria for loving a boy, that most girls would just qualify it based off of sweet surprises of flowers and food or cute good morning texts, but that’s not her world. It never was her world, and with her mom the way she is, with the way _Abby_ is, it’s never going to be. 

Eric has helped her scrub the bloodstains out of her favorite flannel, even when she told him he didn’t need to. Eric has given her the blessed distraction of _Lord of the Rings_ fandom gossip or enjoyably-crappy video games when she’s felt like her brain was on the verge of breaking, and she’s never had to ask him to. Eric has been there from day one, has taken the guts and the gore and the utterly overwhelming _fear_ without so much as a hint of wanting to back out, and how can anyone else live up to that? How will anyone else in her life ever compare, when he’s literally been willing to die for her family before?

 

Abby can’t pinpoint the exact moment she knew she was screwed. Maybe it was in the aftermath of her mom attacking the creepy Serb, and she’d had blood spattered all over her face, and Eric had grabbed a washcloth and wiped it off her cheek like it was nothing, so tender that it made her want to both vomit and cry (she is proud to say that she ended up doing neither). Maybe it was when she thanked him for the first time for helping her family, and he’d shrugged it off like it was nothing, as though committing multiple felonies over the course of a few days was par for the course. Maybe it was when she’d showed up at his house one night, adrenaline from the latest drama with her parents too intense to let her sleep, and he’d talked her ear off until she finally fell asleep on his bed (yeah, Lisa had _really_ loved that one).

 

Or maybe it wasn’t just any one moment, which tends to be what Abby lean towards as of late. Maybe, somewhere in between, her respect for Eric grew into liking him, and liking him turned into loving him in a way that equally terrifies and excites her. Maybe there’s not a good way to explain it; Abby certainly can’t articulate it. 

 

It doesn’t really matter, anyway. She might be able to take someone’s brains out with an ice pick, but telling Eric how she actually feels about him (or, even worse, acting on it) is something she doesn’t know she’ll ever have the courage for.

 

—

The aftermath of her killing Morgan is the first time she tells Eric in no uncertain terms about how bad her nightmares can be, but a part of her believes he’s known for far longer than that. Because the nightmares didn’t start with her shoving a knife into a stranger’s skull; they started the day she thought her mom might have died, the day she first had to worry that her mother might turn into something someday that she wouldn’t recognize, someone who wouldn’t pack her stupid brown-bag lunches and make her say “I love you” before she left for school every morning. 

 

Most nights, she just wakes up panting, her heart racing and her chest tight. Those nights, she’ll send Eric a funny picture of a dog or something, whatever she can scrounge up on Instagram, or, if she’s feeling particularly daring, search surreal memes on Reddit until she finds one she thinks will freak him out enough. He’ll send back some ridiculous reaction, something that’ll make her laugh, and after a while, she’ll feel settled enough to go back to sleep or, at least, grab a glass of water. 

 

There are nights where it’s worse, though, and she wakes up shaking and horrified. She’ll FaceTime him, because of course he’ll be up, playing video games or reading weird conspiracy theories on the Internet, and say she couldn’t sleep or whatever, and he’ll pretend to ignore the way her hands tremble as she adjusts the screen. They’ll talk for hours on end, long enough that sometimes there’s no point in either of them going to bed, because they’d just have to get up for school in an hour anyway. And when they do get to school, he won’t ask her about it, will just approach her with a smile and both hands clutching his backpack straps, the way he always does, and exactly how he must know she wants him to.

 

On one night, when the possibility of Anne arresting her parents had seemed all too close and things were beginning to feel all too real, she’d woken up in tears, voice caught on a silent scream of her mother’s name. FaceTiming Eric or texting him hadn’t seemed like enough; she needed to see him, actually _be_ with him, and so she’d snuck in through his window, scaring the ever-living shit out of him in the process. He’d wanted to be mad at her, she could tell, but then he’d noticed the tear tracks on her cheeks and reached for a box of Kleenex instead. 

 

They’d watched _The Office_ on his bed until her eyes had drifted shut, the warmth and solidity of him next to her beyond comforting, and his phone alarm for school had blessedly saved them from Lisa finding them like that the next morning. 

 

When she has the nightmare about Morgan, though, she doesn’t do anything. Not because she doesn’t want to hear Eric’s voice, or watch his eyes light up as he talks about dumb nerd stuff that she’s kind of started to care about, but because she can’t. She can’t have him there, can’t let him comfort her, because now she knows that something is happening between them, knows that she feels more for him than she should, and she can’t keep leaning on him as a crutch when she will never have the guts to admit to him that she wants him to be so much more than that. 

 

It still doesn’t stop her from telling him about it the next day, though.

 

—

People keep telling them to get on with it already. Anne, Lisa, her parents (albeit in subtler ways), even fucking Winter. It’s exhausting, because Abby doesn’t need a thousand different reminders of something she already very well knows — she is in love with Eric, or at least _could_ love him as more than a friend, and it is a problem.

 

It’s a problem, because it makes it hard for her to ignore the stupid fluttering in her stomach at that goofy grin of his, hard to ignore the heat that rises to her cheeks when he starts complimenting her in the school hallway.

 

It’s a problem, because there is no denying the fears constantly running through her mind, the possibility that one day she’ll come home and find Eric in pieces on her kitchen floor, or that he’ll get kidnapped by a Knight, or — _anything_ , really, that involves Eric being less than one hundred percent safe and healthy, is too terrifying to talk about. 

 

And it’s a problem, because she knows it hurts Eric, even if he won’t say as much. She knows it can’t feel great, to have someone debating over whether or not you’re worth entering into a relationship with, to have the feelings you’ve clearly expressed for someone be a constant topic of conversation. It’s unfair to him, in several ways, and Abby hates that.

 

It’s all of these problems combined that makes her start to wonder if being so scared of losing Eric might end up making her lose him in the end, anyway. 

 

—

Eric almost dies for her, and that does it.

 

She may be scared to love him, but he put himself between her and a flesh-eating immortal, and there’s no way she can use her fear as an excuse anymore after that. 

 

So she curls up next to him and shoos away the twinge in her chest when he looks at her with shiny eyes, because she might be scared, but that’s okay.

 

They’ll just have to be scared together. 


End file.
